Our leadership

Belonging here means more to us than just our work. Our team brings a mix of cultures, perspectives and backgrounds. What we all have in common is that we are expert operators who go above and beyond to make big things happen.

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Leadership

Renée La Londe

CEO and Founder

Renée La Londe founded iTalent Digital in 2005 with the vision of forging a new paradigm in tech consulting. In 2019, iTalent added SaaS to its expertise by launching three first-in-class SaaS products, an accomplishment that led to her being named Tech Innovator of the Year by Golden Bridge Awards in 2020.

Renée’s groundbreaking contributions to the industry through iTalent have won her company more than twenty Stevie® Awards, two Forrester Groundswell Awards, five Lithy Awards, two Best in Biz Awards, the Cisco Diversity Award, and many other accolades.

Renée La Londe has devoted herself to helping women find their voice in the tech industry and closing the gender gap in STEM throughout her career. In recognition of her efforts in this area, she was named Most Inspiring Executive in STEM by Women in STEM.

She is the founder of GLAM (Girls Leadership Academy Meetup), a nonprofit initiative that teaches girls aged 8-12 business acumen, leadership, and computer coding skills, to address the root causes of the gender gap early in life.

Renée was named one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech by the National Diversity Council, is the recipient of an Enterprising Women of the Year Award and the National Mentoring Awards STEM Mentoring Award, and was named to the prestigious CRN Women of the Channel List. She also won a Stevie® Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year, and participated as an expert speaker at Global Telecom Women’s Network and Women4Tech during Mobile World Congress, among other industry conferences. She co-wrote the book, Social Knowledge: Organizational Currencies in the New Knowledge Economy.

Fred Walters

Chief Innovation Officer & Partner

Fred Walters leads iTalent’s digital transformation efforts. Prior to joining iTalent, Fred held a variety of senior management roles at Apple, Sun Microsystems, Cisco and Interwoven, where he led implementations of numerous customer-facing applications ranging from CRM and ERP to complex e-commerce systems.

After establishing a proven track record with well-known high-tech companies, Fred founded Before the Call, an integrated sales intelligence solution – an inaugural Salesforce.com AppExchange Partner.

Since joining iTalent in 2007, Fred leads strategic and transformational practices in social collaboration, big data and business intelligence, mobile apps, and cloud.

He is co-author of the book, Social Knowledge: Organizational Currencies in the New Knowledge Economy.

Caleb Hernandez

Group CFO & Partner

Caleb joined iTalent in 2000 as a technology consultant and in 2005, after successfully holding various business systems consultant roles at high tech giants Cisco and Network Appliance, he joined the iTalent corporate operations team.

His past experience as a hands on client consultant plus his success in various operational roles in iTalent, over the past 10 years, gives him the broad perspective required to partner with our clients and to provide a great environment for our employees. His team is responsible for the day to day operations and ensuring customer and employee satisfaction. Caleb completed advanced training for maintaining a high-performing minority business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Raju Kotha

CTO

Raju is the Chief Executive Officer and leads the iTalent Hyderabad Development Center. He is responsible for building digital competencies, driving technology strategies, and delivering trusted secure solutions to its customers. He is an ambitious individual with a portfolio of passion for organizational development, team leadership, and management.

Raju achieved his Master’s degree in Software Engineering at Osmania University in 1998 and comes with an outstanding experience of over 23 years in technology and enterprise software. Raju held various positions at NetApp, he has formerly worked in various sectors ranging from enterprise solutions architecture, project management, software development, and customer self-service enablement. Raju believes that the best organizational culture and attention to detail are essential to creating marvels.

Leslie Ottavi

Chief of Transformation

Leslie Ottavi is Chief Transformation Officer at iTalent Digital. She connects your business vision to transformation execution by listening, learning, and adapting to infuse change agility into your organization’s DNA. She is passionate about delivering sustainable business outcomes, applying 20+ years of experience with global Fortune 500 clients in breaking down silos to accelerate and elevate transformational change.

Her thought leadership in enterprise change leadership has culminated in iTalent Digital’s Change as a Service (CaaS) model and the ChaMa change management cloud solution, an AI-driven SaaS product, to empower clients to lead change smarter, together.

Silvia Quintanilla

Head of Sales Enablement

Silvia joined iTalent Digital in June 2013 and is currently based in Fremont, CA. She currently heads Sales Enablement for iTalent. This role takes advantage of Silvia’s 15+ years of experience supporting enterprise B2B salespeople and teams. She excels in this role by optimizing and weaving together tools, training, and data to enable sales to reach their full potential.

Before joining iTalent she spent ten years as the founder of Industry Gems Sales Intelligence. In this B2B sales enablement role, she produced Fortune 500 “playbooks” that helped enterprise sales teams understand the priorities of their biggest accounts.

Prior to Industry Gems, Silvia spent 15 years working in B2B sales. She received her degree in business administration from California State East Bay. In her personal time, she enjoys spending time with family, reading, traveling and walking in nature.

Valerie Risch

VP of Enterprise Collaboration Solutions

Valerie is an accomplished technology leader, delivering business development and innovation through technology planning, management and architecture consulting. After working at First Union National Bank, she pursued a consulting career that focused on business and technology requirements and architecture, as well as technology process, development, integration, deployment, planning and management for Fortune 500 companies. A few of these include BB&T, Duke Energy, Kimberly Clark, and Lowe’s.

In 2004, she founded her own business focused on assisting Fortune 500 companies with technology initiatives. She also implemented technology planning programs for a variety of localized businesses such as municipal non-profits, as well as executive recruitment, M&A, legal, medical, life sciences and technology start-ups.

Since joining iTalent in 2013, Valerie continues to provide technology and strategy direction for Fortune 100 organizations as the Enterprise Content and Collaboration Practice Leader. She demonstrates remarkable technology and business acumen, understands the value of process management, and has an ability to lead efforts in situations of ambiguity, shifts in technology, and organizational change.

Peter Nguyen

VP of Business Development & Partner

Peter is a highly accomplished, dedicated technology leader with over 15 years of experience at start-up, mid-level, and complex Fortune 500 companies. His breadth of expertise spans business and technical strategy, program/portfolio management, agile product development, release management and business intelligence.

His accomplishments since joining iTalent in 2006 include impacting over US$3 billion in total purchase volume as the lead for PayPal’s C-Level initiative (Voice of the Customer), establishing a technical Project Management Office, successfully deploying Cisco’s largest business intelligence release, and launching iTalent’s first service-delivery transformation project, which spawned iTalent Digital’s award-winning Enterprise Collaboration practice.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Business from Santa Clara University. He loves spending time with his family and spends his spare time involved in sports leagues as well as coaching kid’s football & basketball.

Polo Crosbie

Chief of Staff

Polo brings over ten years’ experience in client delivery and team leadership across multiple iTD customers. He has led a series of large complex global IT and operations engagements in the hi-tech and retail sectors. He also led iTD’s business in Europe.

He is passionate about people, teamwork and emerging technologies. When he’s not working, you can find him swimming, cycling, running, or reminiscing of his glory days playing in rock bands more regularly!

Christie Burdick

Head of People & Culture

Christie was appointed as the Head of People & Culture in June of 2023 and brings a wealth of expertise and experience to our organization.

Christie possesses a fantastic track record as a certified Human Resources professional, with a tenure of over 15 years in the field. Her specialization in all aspects related to “People & Culture” has allowed her to position Human Resources departments in alignment with organizational goals and objectives.  Over the course of her career, Christie has excelled in various roles, including Generalist positions, HR business partnerships, as well as Director positions, spearheading strategic HR/People initiatives for organizations navigating the complexities of growth.

One of Christie’s notable strengths lies in her ability to foster employee engagement, an essential element in cultivating a thriving and harmonious work environment. Her extensive knowledge in this area enables her to implement effective strategies that not only enhance employee satisfaction but also contribute to the overall success of the organization. Additionally, Christie’s expertise extends to career development and performance management, areas she has demonstrated exceptional proficiency in throughout her career.

Christie enjoys spending all of her free time with her children and family and friends, hiking, biking and being by the water.

Vikas Sachdeva

VP of Product Engineering

Vikas has 25+ years of experience in providing architectural, technical & functional leadership in development, configuration, delivery of CRM, integration, custom application, business intelligence & enterprise search, for global organizations like Netapp, HP, Finastra, Global Foundries and other hi-tech companies. He brings extensive experience in delivering solutions from conception to production using global teams.

As the VP of Product Engineering at iTalent, he is responsible for shaping and implementing the product vision, strategy and design. He is passionate about adopting technology to solve business problems. He holds a Bachelors of Engineering degree in Electronics from University of Mumbai, India.

Kevin Yee

VP of Business Operations

Purpose-driven and collaborative, Kevin Yee brings over 16 years of experience as a technology consulting leader. He has passion for partnering with the world’s most influential organizations to solve their most pressing challenges. Kevin operates at the cross-section of strategy and execution with a demonstrated history of client satisfaction across numerous enterprise initiatives. Kevin and his team have been the recipients of multiple client awards for delivery excellence.

As VP of Business Operations, Kevin’s goal is to bring the best of iTalent to clients through developing client relationships, delivery management, and client and Ambassador satisfaction. He is responsible for aligning iTalent’s operational functions to set goals, design scalable processes and ensure business are on track.

Kevin joined iTalent in 2018 after 7 years at a global consulting firm. Some of his most recent accomplishments for a leading retailer include standing up the enterprise data platform to enable marketing segmentation and personalization initiatives, program management of ML models for customer insights, establishing agile practices across technical projects, and deploying point-of-sale upgrades to over 450 stores in North America.

Kevin holds an MBA from Chicago Booth and Engineering degrees from the University of California at Davis and the University of Southern California. He resides in the Bay Area and loves spending family time persuading his kids to try different cuisines and then perfecting new recipes at home.

Ramesh Ayinala

Director of Technologies & Engineering

Ramesh has over 15 years of IT experience. Prior to joining iTalent in 2015, Ramesh held a variety of senior technology roles at Digi International, Effone Technologies and Sharper Logics, Inc.

His outstanding technical knowledge in the software industry, combined with his managerial skills, enables him to build successful development teams that can deliver positive results. “Get it done” is his mantra at work, and he influences the team at Hyderabad Development Center with the same energy.

Ramesh has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Andhra University.

Spencer Liu

Senior Director of Product

Spencer Liu leads iTalent’s SaaS product initiatives. With a passion in product strategy and design, Spencer created the first online rich media advertising display in the world while partnering with FedEx, Dell and Samsung. This innovation was later on adopted by the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) as the global online advertising standards. From there, Spencer founded and lead multiple SaaS startups covering the automotive, mobile gaming, and digital media industries.

These experiences have made Spencer into a multifaceted talent with experiences ranging from fund raising to spin offs, and strategies to product launches. On a personal level, Spencer and his wife enjoy traveling with a passion to deeply immerse themselves in different cultural experiences. Together they’ve visited 20+ international destinations and lived in 4 different countries outside of the US.

Dennis Vaughn

VP of Cloud Engineering

Dennis Vaughn is an experienced, hands-on software architect, entrepreneur and leader. He has worked in nearly every industry starting companies, leading teams and building software.

His most recent software work involves architecture, design, and implementation of microservice based architectures and distributed systems.

Allison Jones

Head of Recruiting

Allison Jones is a dynamic Global Talent Acquisition Leader, passionate about elevating people, building future leadership and still gets excited by the hunt of recruiting and sourcing. For the past decade and a half, Allison has worked in different industries and successfully identified improvement opportunities and spearheaded projects to enhance effectiveness. Allison’s joy comes from working with stakeholders to assemble top-performing teams and strategic partners. Each day Allison strives to innovate and embrace unconventional approaches to her work and loves leveraging data, AI and Machine Learning whenever possible.

Aside from Allison’s professional pursuits, she revels in traveling (27 countries and counting!), listening to books on Audible and practicing outdoor yoga along the cliffs and beaches of sunny, southern California. Allison adores animals (she is slightly partial to dogs) and loves when people share pics and stories of their furry friends!

Ryan McNaught

Head of BI, Data & Analytics

Ryan leads a global team of data professionals who help clients unlock the value of their BI, Data & Analytics solutions. With over 20 years of experience in management consulting, he has an extensive track record for incubating and scaling new capabilities with clients across several industries; most notably, retail, high-tech, life sciences, biotech, financial services, insurance and higher education.

His specialties include defining data strategies, building high-performing teams, overseeing the delivery of business objectives, and providing thought leadership on emerging data and AI trends. Ryan is passionate about creating data-driven cultures, enabling data governance, driving business intelligence, adopting AI and machine learning, and exploring new generative AI, GPT, data mesh, and data fabric design patterns.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business from Illinois State University. He enjoys fly fishing, exploring other cultures, and spending time with his family.

Customer Satisfaction is the soul of our business.” ~ Renée La Londe, CEO and Founder

Board of Advisors

Mark Ciotek

Adviser to the Board of Directors

Mark has more than 35 years of experience as a high-tech executive. He was the founder and CEO of NCA Corp., a public software company specializing in design automation and MRP enterprise systems. Mark holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from London University and is a graduate of the Stanford University Business Executive Program.

Promise Phelon

Advisory Board Member

Promise Phelon is a serial entrepreneur who has a proven track record of raising capital, as well as transforming, exiting and buying companies. She has helped large tech organizations leverage the voice of the customer to drive strategic change, architect and execute business model transformations, and drive value for startups. She seeks to be the champion of underdogs, to guide companies as a member of their board of directors and to manifest explosive growth for every deal that she touches.

Questions? Contact our experts today.

Locations
  • San Jose, California (HQ)
  • San Francisco, California
  • Austin, Texas
  • Wichita, Kansas
  • Hyderabad, India
  • Krakow, Poland
  • Guadalajara, Mexico
  • London, UK
  • Cork, Ireland